Page 88 of Winning Bid

“One of the more interesting facets of life that I've discovered since being outside of prison is the amount of interesting things you can do with a computer.”

“You mean like faking my e-mail?”

His smirk grows into a full smile. “I mean digital fraud.”

“Yeah, the e-mail?—"

But he shakes his head. “That was small potatoes compared to what I'm talking about. Back at HQ, we've got these real smart guys. And smart girls. They know all about those advanced algorithms and bots and a bunch of other stuff that they yammer on about that I don't understand. And some of them came to me with an idea.”

Oh hell. “What idea?”

“Now don't go getting an attitude. This has a very high success rate.”

He must have said that to himself about every scam he'd run until now. It's funny. I'm pretty sure the first con that any con man pulls is on themselves to convince themselves their crazy plans will work. “Just tell me.”

“Alright, see, what I do is, I sell Andre on a big advertising push online. And I mean big. We're talking in the millions. And my tech friends, they generate a bunch of false traffic using their algorithms and bots and whatever so that it looks like the website is getting an inordinate amount of hits. It inflates the web traffic. All the ad views go way up. His advertisers, marketers, they don't know what's going on other than it's working.”

I don’t quite follow him. “And that makes you money?”

“Well, sure. I come off looking like a marketing genius. More importantly, because of the way that we set up the contract, we get a cut every single time somebody clicks. Even if we made that somebody up.”

Yeah, that's fraud. “That's one hell of a gamble.”

“It gets better. Andre, being Andre, is happy to recommend me to any of his friends who might need some online marketing help. I get in good with his friends. I get their accounts. Soon, a little project getting us a few million is a big project getting us tens of millions of dollars, maybe more.” He grins. “Now my little techie friends there, they know all about digital marketing platforms and networks and all that good stuff. They do the back end. I take care of the front end.”

“You're the salesman.”

He nods. “I do what comes naturally. I make friends.”

“And use them to steal from them.”

“Now, now, I'm not stealing from Andre. Though given how he's treated you, I don't think you could really be mad at me for that. Mostly we're stealing from the advertisers.”

“I can't believe you still have your job.”

He laughs. “Of course I do. I'm in sales. The first thing you ever sell is yourself.”

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter. Dad is Dad. If he's breathing, he's scheming. I am genuinely unsure what to do with that. I can't trust him. But I know it. With him being close to Andre, maybe I can use that if I need to.

“Granny always said you were a real piece of work.”

He laughs hard. “That woman always hated me. Even before I gave her a reason to.”

“Sometimes you just know when somebody's up to no good.”

“Ah, now, Junebug, you're going to hurt my feelings.”

“Is that even possible?”

His laughter fades away. He looks me in the eyes. “It is. You did a good job of it last time we spoke.”

“Was I wrong?”

“It's good to see you.” A swift dodge as ever.

I'd like to be able to say that it's good to see him too. I'm just not sure. “So this whole time you were trying to get to know me was actually you trying to get in good with Andre, right?”

“I'm a networker. Things for me are never that black or white. The world is full of grey.”

---